TMCnet News

ShoreTel Cures Communication Ills for Healthcare Organizations
[February 01, 2010]

ShoreTel Cures Communication Ills for Healthcare Organizations


(Market Wire Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) SUNNYVALE, CA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 02/01/10 -- ShoreTel® (NASDAQ: SHOR), the leading provider of brilliantly simple IP phone systems with fully integrated Unified Communications (UC), is increasingly being chosen by healthcare organizations seeking the right prescription to cure a variety of communication ills that plague medical staff, administrators and IT managers.



Despite tight budgets, healthcare organizations are under increasing pressure to expand and upgrade their communication systems to ensure more efficient operation, better collaboration among cross-discipline teams, and faster responses to medical situations. In addition, typical hospital IT staffs have few expert resources in telephony, despite having to manage the diverse PBX systems deployed at the many facilities that make up today's complex healthcare institutions.

Designed and built for the IP age, the ShoreTel system is easy to deploy, use and administer. It delivers an N+1 distributed architecture that ensures reliable connectivity across multiple facilities and associated practices. With support for open standards, ShoreTel makes it easy to integrate existing PBX systems, the variety of devices typically used in and around hospitals, and various healthcare applications, including nurse call systems and electronic medical record systems.


"Healthcare institutions have several competing needs," said Kevin Gavin, vice president of marketing for ShoreTel. "They must deploy the latest communications technology in order to improve services, but they often don't have large budgets or large IT staffs, and most doctors and nurses don't have the time to learn new and complex systems. ShoreTel's ease of deployment and use, along with its ability to easily integrate with existing PBX systems, devices and software solutions, lets organizations add the capabilities they need without busting their budgets or overburdening their medical staff." With ShoreTel, healthcare institutions can leverage their existing IT staff to create a seamless, centrally managed communications system that immediately connects the right medical personnel and the right resources at the right time -- and doesn't force doctors and nurses to learn a new and complex technology.

Select ShoreTel Healthcare Deployments Doctors Hospital at Renaissance, Edinburg, Texas Doctors Hospital at Renaissance remains an unwavering beacon of hope for the ever-increasing population of Rio Grande Valley in Texas. With a mission to deliver quality, compassionate, and cost-effective patient care through its state-of-the-art facilities, Doctors Hospital has grown nearly ten-fold in the last decade. This growth precipitated a need for a new IP-based communication system across multiple medical campuses to ensure quality healthcare services.

Robert Acosta, director of technology services and security, Doctors Hospital at Renaissance "With pressure to provide top-notch patient care while controlling costs, the hospital needed to boost the availability, mobility and capabilities of its communications infrastructure. We did not want our doctors and staff to be hindered by technology, especially in light of new facilities opening to the public. ShoreTel offered us seamless, easy-to-use IP business communications that give our medical personnel the freedom to focus on their patients -- and our IT staff can provide improved service quickly and cost-effectively." Urban Health Plan, Bronx, New York With more than 30 years of service and a deeply rooted foundation in the South Bronx, Urban Health Plan's mission is to continuously improve the health status of underserved communities by providing affordable, comprehensive, and high quality primary and specialty medical care and by assuring the performance and advancement of innovative best practices. To help reduce phone system management costs and simplify management, Urban Health Plan chose ShoreTel with its easy-to-use enterprise-wide management console that works with the organizations variety of switches.

Daniel Figueras, chief technology officer, Urban Health Plan "Not only has ShoreTel made our communications more efficient by integrating email, but system management has been greatly simplified.

Adding a new site recently was extremely easy and moves, adds and changes are now performed by our own IT staff, not telecom specialists. As we plan to add more sites in 2010 and upgrade to a new video telemedicine system, ShoreTel gives us a reliable and cost-effective platform for growth." RehabCare, St. Louis, Missouri RehabCare is a leading provider of physical rehabilitation program management services and facilities with 1,200 hospital programs, skilled nursing facilities and other long-term care facilities throughout the United States. The company is committed not only to using the latest treatment technologies, but going above and beyond to deliver personalized, reassuring care to help their patients regain their lives. The ShoreTel UC system helps them stay connected with patients, even after they have gone home, and puts the right data in the right hands at the right time.

Jim O'Brien, director of technical services, RehabCare "Patients, caregivers and RehabCare associates need the comfort and reassurance of being able to reach a live person right away. For patient safety and satisfaction, missed or dropped calls are not an option. Of all the solutions we looked at, ShoreTel is the most reliable, easy to use and easy to manage. We have to support analog phones and other medical devices in our facilities, and ShoreTel was the only company to support analog with just one piece of equipment and no special gateways. I don't have to add a server every time I want to add a new capability, and the built-in redundancy makes five-nines availability simple and cost-effective." Altru Health System, Grand Forks, North Dakota Since 1997, Altru Health System has been delivering world-class integrated health care services across 19 locations in North Dakota and Minnesota. It provides health education, preventive services, early intervention and other appropriate care to more than 200,000 residents and maintains a community of more than 3,000 healthcare professionals and support staff.

When Altru needed a quick and easy to manage implementation strategy for migrating their legacy Nortel system to an all-IP based solution, it chose ShoreTel.

Matt Schumacher, IT director, Altru Health System "ShoreTel's simple design allowed us to deploy the system quickly on our own without requiring professional services or system integrators. Many of our employees have found great value in ShoreTel's Professional Call Manager, which enables new unified communications capabilities resulting in higher productivity and greater accessibility. With ShoreTel we can more effectively support the hardware and software ourselves, which gives us greater confidence in our ability to keep voice communications up and running at all times in order to provide healthcare services to our over 250,000 residents throughout the region." For detailed information on ShoreTel products and features, click here.

RELATED LINKS & CONVERSATION -- ShoreTel Customer Success Stories (videos and case studies) -- ShoreTel Features -- ShoreTel blog -- ShoreTel Twitter -- ShoreTel awards About ShoreTel, Inc.

ShoreTel, Inc. (NASDAQ: SHOR) is the provider of brilliantly simple Unified Communication (UC) solutions based on its award-winning IP business phone system. We offer organizations of all sizes integrated, voice, video, data, and mobile communications on an open, distributed IP architecture that helps significantly reduce the complexity and costs typically associated with other solutions. The feature-rich ShoreTel UC system offers the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) and the highest customer satisfaction in the industry, in part because it is easy to deploy, manage, scale and use.

Increasingly, companies around the world are finding a competitive edge by replacing business-as-usual with new thinking, and choosing ShoreTel to handle their integrated business communication. ShoreTel is based in Sunnyvale, California, and has regional offices in Austin, Texas, United Kingdom, Sydney, Australia and Munich, Germany. For more information, visit www.shoretel.com.

Press Contact: Elizabeth Hilton Eastwick Communications Tel: +650-480-4018 [email protected]

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]